Saturday, June 14, 2008

There are certain days when you can feel the air sucking out of Washington’s giant hot-air balloon, and Friday was one of them.

News of the “Meet the Press” host’s death moved entirely too fast, in that unnerving way that these things do in the viral media world, but especially here — the cycle of rumor to “did you hear?” to confirmation (“it’s online”) to disbelief lasted a matter of minutes. Riders on the D.C. Metro stared into their BlackBerrys, and every politician with access to e-mail was issuing statements, from the president on down.

These were the kind of days when Washington lives up to the cliché that it is really a small town — in the same way that Wall Street, Broadway and Hollywood are small towns, too, incubating outsize egos and ambitions, but also different. People remembered the big achievements of Mr. Russert’s career (“the pre-eminent political journalist of his generation,” said in a statement) and the little kindnesses, too (“When my mom died he sent two dozen roses,” wrote Ann Klenk, a producer at MSNBC’s “Hardball,” in an e-mail message. “I adored him.”)

In a sense, Mr. Russert seemed to have an intuitive grasp of all the petty concerns, Big Doings and peculiar rhythms of the place. He was a cut-throat killer when it came to booking guests on “Meet the Press,” and also a chummy neighbor who would watch the Washington Nationals play baseball with friend/rival Bob Schieffer, the host of CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Several years ago, Mr. Schieffer recalls, a minor league baseball team held a one-night “Bob Schieffer bobble-head doll” promotion.

“The next day on my desk was a little box with a bobble-head doll of Russert,” Mr. Schieffer remembers. “It was his way of saying, ‘Just so you know I have one, too.’ ”

Washington is the kind of place where people make sport of their outsize sense of pecking order while simultaneously flaunting their place in it whether such status is enacted at a roast at the Washington Hilton or on the face of a bobble-head doll.

It’s also a town of revolving doors, for which Mr. Russert was something of an exemplar, for better or worse. He was a longtime aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who became a television commentator, placing him in a cohort of politics-to-TV re-inventers (MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, among them) who can coat Georgetown book parties or Capitol Hill poker games with a distinctively incestuous film. (Why go to the dinner when you can stay home and watch it on C-Span? Or not?)

Another local cliché: Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. So in a town that’s in fact entirely over-populated with blow-dried preeners, it seemed entirely appropriate that the signature TV star be, if not ugly, aggressively “not pretty.” Indeed, Mr. Russert seemed to intentionally hold his face at crooked angles, like he was sidling up to a Rust Belt dive bar (as opposed to, say, his favorite lunch joint in Washington, the Palm).

Mr. Russert liked to seem sheepishly above-it-all, but was also as acutely status-conscious, befitting the local water. He was always mindful of not appearing too often on MSNBC, NBC’s cable cousin, for fear of diluting his big-league brand. He was known primarily as a TV star to most people, but often identified himself by his more hierarchical title, “Washington bureau chief.” There is no shortage of politicians, beginning with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who believed Mr. Russert could be bullying and prone to grandstanding at times, making excessive show of his top-of-the-heap position.

One of my enduring images of Mr. Russert was at a 60th birthday party for “Meet the Press” last November, held at the not-yet-open Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol. It was one of those lots-of-famous-people affairs in which those who had been guests of “Meet the Press” were delineated by special blue ribbons on their lapels — a kind of varsity letter to signify high standing in the chattering class.

There was a long and snaking receiving line at the front that ended with Mr. Russert himself. It had the strange vibe of people waiting in line to pay respects to the king, which the king himself seemed to recognize, and he kept stepping away, as if to interrupt any hint of a grand procession.

Presidential candidates viewed their “Meet the Press” grilling as a rite of passage onto the national political stage. Pundits would review the candidate’s performance as if it were opening night on Broadway (“Edwards bombed,” “Obama held his own”). Journalists vied to get invited onto “Meet” as a way to confer A-list status. “Meet the Press” became known in shorthand as simply “Russert,” in the same way that “The Tonight Show” became “Carson.”

As a personality, Mr. Russert had achieved a neat synthesis between Washington big deal and Buffalo real deal. He was someone who had become so entrenched in the political scenery that it was always a little weird to actually see his face in person. (“Hey, that looks like Tim Russert. Wait, it is Tim Russert.”) Ted Kennedy has the same kind of countenance. And come to think of it, Friday felt a little like the day last month when word spread about Mr. Kennedy’s malignant brain tumor. It was hard to imagine the political life without the guy. And it was hard to talk about anything else.

I hardly knew Tim Russert personally, and I hesitate to even relay this for fear of appearing to. We probably had about a half-dozen conversations over the years, invariably on politics, his beloved Buffalo Bills or the Boston College sports teams (his son went to school there). My last encounter with Mr. Russert was at a Democratic debate in Cleveland, which he was moderating. I was with his colleague Mr. Matthews — I was writing about Mr. Matthews for the New York Times Magazine — and we ran into Mr. Russert in the lobby of the Cleveland Ritz Carlton. He had just worked out and was wearing a sweaty Bills sweatshirt and long shorts and black loafers with tube socks. An MSNBC spokesman who was with us tried to declare Mr. Russert’s attire “off the record,” which I found hilarious, and which I was of course compelled to include in the story. When I called Mr. Russert to tell him this, and he laughed so hard, I had to move the phone away from my ear.

Just do me one favor,” Mr. Russert said. “Say they were rubber-soled shoes, will you?” Done.

He laughed again, and we talked vividly, I recall, on the topic of how so many people in Washington are obsessed with where they rank, how they’re perceived. It’s a particularly acute concern in television and politics — ratings, veepstakes, poll numbers, the kind of things that mean everything and nothing in Washington. “You can drive yourself crazy if you worry too much about that stuff,” Mr. Russert said, with the self-assurance of a man atop the Washington heap and comfortable in his shoes.